25 Years Ago in Beirut

“I saw a mushroom cloud rising several hundred feet in the air,” Randy Gaddo writes in a chilling op-ed in today’s Times. “I took off running toward it, and I remember that as I rounded a corner of a building I saw that all the leaves had been stripped from every tree and bush in sight.” Gaddo was a Marine staff sergeant in Beirut in 1983; he was headed toward the Marine barracks that morning after snagging a cup of coffee. In an instant, more than 200 of his fellow soldiers were dead, and Gaddo was shouting, “The barracks are gone!” Gaddo sees our quick pullback from Beirut a reason for staying the course in Iraq and Afghanistan: “Had we stood our ground 25 years ago instead of pulling out after the bombing, it is possible that 9/11 would not have happened.”